Guardian On the US treatment of prisoners: "'Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people,' said President Bush plaintively. Indeed, but it is in the nature of the circumstances that Bush has authorised for holding 10,000 prisoners without trial, many in unknown, secret prisons. 'That's not the way we do things in America,' he says. Indeed, it is only the way America does things when it goes abroad; the American constitution protects its own citizens. The self-blinding American myth is that a 'freedom-loving nation' built on the ideals of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could never do such things. "